She slipped away towards the bar, touching shoulders, taking cash and empties and swiftly returned with a glass of wine and, as on nights without number in the years before Fern, a paper napkin carefully folded, which she tucked beneath the glass like a coaster as she set it down. The napkin would not be empty. ‘This one’s on the house,’ she said, touching his shoulder and nodding at someone else who was gesturing for her. ‘For your mum.’
He drank the unfamiliar wine indecently fast, in four or five greedy mouthfuls so that he scarcely tasted it, then snatched up the paper napkin and hurried to the gents. He needed the rush, the warmth, the glittering sense of invincible self-confidence. He had missed this! He had missed feeling so attractive and caring so little.
All the cubicles were occupied, though perhaps he only fancied the sniffing sounds coming from inside them. There was a discarded newspaper by the sinks. He had a pee for something to do, then picked up the paper because he felt uneasy and stupid just waiting. It wasn’t the proper newspaper but the tabloid insert, the bit with the fluffy stories and the television listings.
As he flicked through, his eye was snagged by a photograph of a strange creature, a little like a gazelle, only thicker-necked, apparently tethered and wretched in a wooden enclosure.
ASIAN ‘UNICORN’ PHOTOGRAPHED FOR FIRST TIME IN OVER A DECADE
, he read.
For the first time in more than ten years, there has been a confirmed encounter with one of the rarest, most mysterious animals in the world, the saola of Laos and Vietnam.
He looked again at the photograph, oblivious to men now leaving the cubicles to wash their hands. Even in colour the creature was a ghostly grey with delicate white markings on its face. The two horns rose straight up in a long V from its forehead. It lay unnaturally, with one leg bent out away from its body, a rope wound several times around its neck.
Unfortunately this male animal, weakened by the ordeal of several days in captivity, died shortly after the arrival of a team from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, who took this photograph. The saola was found in a village’s sacred forest in remote Xaychamphon District but it is not clear why the villagers took it into captivity.
Obviously it wasn’t a unicorn – it had two horns – but the story had been explained to him on his visit to Vietnam as a teenager. He knew it was the likely inspiration for the myths of the Quilin or Lan, the unicorn whose rare appearances among men conferred heavenly grace. One was said to have appeared at the birth of Confucius. Inevitably another was rumoured to have appeared at the time of the birth of Christ.
It was pathetic, as wretched as any captive animal, and yet there was something in its eyes, even in such a poor-quality photograph, that implied it had bowed its head for the villagers’ rope, chosen to leave its sacred forest to spend its last hours amid the stench and smoke, the shouts and prodding sticks of their alien community.
Phuc flushed napkin and unopened paper packet away and left by the back entrance to avoid returning to the bar and the enquiry of Vivien’s sweet-sharp gaze. There was a police number stored on his mobile, for a stitch-up-your-mates line. It was displayed on posters around the dependency clinic and in the crypt where NA held their meetings. He had dutifully drawn clients’ attention to it and made sure a card with it on was included in their welcome packs when they first registered for his help, but he had always assumed it was a piece of political window dressing and was hardly ever rung. Ringing it now, he pictured an old plastic phone jangling unregarded in a barely used office.
Sure enough, it was answered by a machine. He knew they recorded calls for a reason. For most callers, recording a message was less threatening by far than actually speaking to a policeman. And it saved departmental costs.
He hesitated, doubting his motives. There was a ten-second pause then the machine cut him off.
He drove home through the rain, with great care, feeling light-headed and distinctly drunk but thrillingly alive and in his skin, to present Fern with his dead mother’s ring.
Autumn was Nuala’s favourite season, especially in West Cornwall where even early October routinely offered golden weather and warm seas without the holiday crowds. The carn above her house was gaudy with heather and gorse and there were so few trees in the area that only fields of barley stubble left for the wintering birds and stretches of browning bracken reminded one the year was entering old age.
The girls had wanted no hothouse flowers in the church so for a month she had been gathering seed pods from her own garden – dramatic ones such as opium poppy, sea holly, acanthus and allium – and had thrown a pair of vases especially, iridescent sea green with quirky handles in the shape of C and M. Her arrangements stood on plain wooden pillars (made by Carrie) on either side of the chairs where the girls were to sit. Now that she knew where the key was hidden, she had been able to slip down the previous night to set them up and thought they looked pretty fine. She reckoned she looked pretty fine too, having had her hair done and chosen her outfit with great care.
When she had realized the sad symmetry by which neither bride had a mother still living, she had jokingly offered herself for the role – mother of the brides – and had been first bewildered then touched that they had taken her in earnest and welcomed the suggestion. Despite their laughing insistence, she had refused to wear a hat. She had bought a new dress, however: a sheath in iridescent blue silk which showed her legs to advantage but not too much cleavage. In case it made her look too sexy or, more worryingly, like some divorcée on the prowl, she found a demure, raw silk jacket with sleeves ending just below the elbow. These were an extravagance – she had actually crossed the Tamar to find them – but a happy one.
She had always known Carrie, of course, though not well and had hired her to build new kitchen cupboards for her once, and another time picture frames, without telling Barnaby, who didn’t need to know everything. She had done her best to draw her out and befriend her during the few visits to the house the work entailed. Superficially she was more Dot’s child than his – it had been Lenny who looked so like him, if only one knew to look for the resemblance – yet Carrie’s equable nature and the careful way she measured her words had clearly been shaped by him. And if she spoke with her mother’s accent, it was with her father’s voice.
The speed with which Nuala had come to know them as a couple, however, had been Morwenna’s doing. Morwenna’s nature was quicksilver and enthusiastic and, beneath the surface flutter and fragile charm, there was a steely surety of purpose that reminded one she was her late mother’s daughter. Nuala had met Rachel Kelly several times professionally, at gallery openings and the like, and been both envious and afraid of her. She had seen enough to know it would take a certain toughness in a daughter to withstand and survive such a parent. As a pair, the girls – she made a mental note to stop calling them that, it sounded so patronizing – the two
young women
were better matched than they yet realized themselves. They would prove quietly awe-inspiring, she suspected, as they aged together.
A car pulled up outside the church and other guests soon walked in, smiling shyly at her because they were not sure who she was but guessed from her clothes that she had not just dropped in to say a quick prayer. It was Morwenna’s married brother, with his severe-looking wife and the three slightly spookily home-educated daughters. The eldest of these took her place at the battered old harmonium, selected music from a tidy leather case and began to play what sounded like Bach, frowning from the unwonted effort involved in having to pump with her feet as she played. The mother talked quietly to the other daughters while the father looked about him, at the damp patches on the walls, the oddity of the Swedish flag beside the altar, the home-grown seedpods. And he glanced at his watch. He jumped up to introduce himself to the next arrival, who she guessed must be the Vietnamese adopted brother with the name she must remember to rhyme with look not luck. He had a pretty, harassed-looking blonde with him, closer to Nuala’s age than his own, and four blond boys in dazzlingly clean white shirts, like a soap powder ad, who had clearly just submitted to a going-over with her comb and some hair gel. Nuala met the woman’s eye and smiled. The Quaker wife would make mincemeat of her.
Then the lady vicar arrived, Tabby Morris, greeting everyone in turn and thanking Nuala for the flower arrangements and supportively touching the young harmonium player’s shoulder before slipping back out to wait in the porch. As she left, she gave an unconvincingly sunny greeting to Modest Carlsson, who slid in and sat near the back, surely uninvited. Nuala imagined he was the sort of person who haunted weddings and funerals to sup second-hand on the emotion and enjoy a transitory taste of being a member rather than an outcast. He was the only one of them, she noticed, who had knelt to pray, pointedly masking his face in his fat little hands, because this was his church, his hour for devotion, and he wasn’t about to let a mere wedding get in the way.
Not that it was a wedding. Not officially. Officially the girls had seen their Civil Partnership registered (again, not officially a wedding) in Penzance the previous afternoon and this cosily guerrilla occasion, offered by Tabby Morris, was what Tabby called a ‘backdoor blessing’. But they all knew it was a church wedding, which was why nobody, not even the fathers, had been invited to the register office the day before; this was the ceremony that counted.
Outside there was a burst of male laughter at which Modest Carlsson gave a slow glare, then two smartly-suited men came in. From the glee with which the solemn little girls greeted them, including the one trapped at the harmonium, she guessed this was the gay brother from California and his art-dealer spouse – source, no doubt, of many a spoiling, disapproved-of present. This second brother threw her such a dazzling smile when he caught her eye that Nuala had to look down at her hands soon afterwards to ride out one of the surges of grief for Lenny that she had come to accept would now be as much a part of her life as her hay fever or stiff knees. She concentrated on her breathing and the spasm passed. Her spirits were still slightly muffled by antidepressants – she had no intention of crying today, at least not until she was safely home again.
Tabby Morris came back in and had a quiet word with the girl on the harmonium, who stopped abruptly, mid-phrase, which was probably not what Tabby had intended. Nuala thought how much less ridiculous priestly robes looked on a woman than on a man.
‘Good morning, everyone. Thank you to Bryony for the lovely playing. Will you all please stand?’ They stood. ‘Thank you dear,’ she said quietly and Bryony played the march from
La Clemenza di Tito
, rather slowly and stumbling slightly over the flourishes. Everyone looked round, of course, to where the two fathers were waiting, each with a daughter on his arm.
Morwenna had on a dramatic, plum-coloured velvet dress, with her hair piled up on her head with a chaplet of brightly variegated ivy around it. Carrie was in a well-cut black suit, offset by a waistcoat in the same velvet as the dress, with a buttonhole made of the same ivy. Barnaby was in his usual clerical black. Morwenna’s father – a tall, interesting-looking man – unwittingly echoed his daughter-in-law in a suit with no tie. The aisle was too narrow for them to come up four abreast, of course, so Barnaby and Carrie came first and waited beside the right-hand flower arrangement. As soon as the others were beside them the girls, the
young women
, dropped their father’s arms as if spontaneously and held each other’s hands. Job done, the fathers stepped back and prepared to to sit down.
‘Dearly beloved,’ Tabby began. ‘We are here today to bless and celebrate the union of our friends, sisters and daughters, Carrie and Morwenna, if not with the full approval of the Church, then in the eye of God …’
Niamh had supported Nuala from two days after Len’s suicide until three after his cremation. Her intense sense of right and wrong, combined with her unsparing honesty had made Nuala realize how very English she herself had become. Nuala was hedging herself around with ifs and buts, maybes and perhapses, making allowances on every side. But Niamh shook everything down to a stark simplicity as if to say
these are the facts, my love, and these are your options
.
It was lancing, rather than directly healing, wounding deeper so as to allow poison to emerge so that healing might begin. At first Nuala was furious with Len but Niamh helped her see that, far from cowardly, what he had done took courage and conviction and lacked the element of retribution present in so much self-murder. Reading the copy poor little Amy Hawker sent her of the letter he had written, and bitterly regretting now that she had never read the one he wrote for her, the desolate understanding stole over Nuala that, deep down, she had gone into a kind of suppressed mourning for him from the very day of his accident. Her initial rage against him at his death, she understood now, had been codified expression of a kind of shame at her self-deceit.
She wished the collapsing scrum had simply killed him outright.
Niamh had emptied his little flat for her, since Nuala couldn’t face the hideous, insolent shrine outside or running the gauntlet of Kitty Arnold and the other fired-up old biddies tending it like so many wrinkled vestals. His boyhood room at home remained a shrine of her own, and one she found she still could not touch. She had been keeping the door shut but, with Niamh no longer around to preach at her about the unhealthiness of what she was doing, she had taken to sleeping on his bunk bed, marvelling at the view of stars through the porthole window by his pillow, haunted by sweet dreams of his insouciant, bicycling return (sans helmet, naturally) and bad ones of Kitty Arnold, shaking his letter at her. The one she had never read.